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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-12143-9 - T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition Edited by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding Frontmatter More information

T. S. ELIOT AND THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION

T. S. Eliot’s reformulation of the idea of literary tradition has been one of the key critical concepts of the twentieth century. In this first book-length reappraisal of tradition, an international team of scho- lars explores the concept from a variety of theoretical and historical perspectives, including a series of illuminating case studies evaluating Eliot’s version of tradition alongside the theories of other major twentieth-century critics. This volume will be of great interest to students of literary theory, modernist studies and intellectual history, initiating a dialogue between Continental and Anglo-American investigations into the nature of literary traditions. Tradition is a concept often viewed by contemporary critics with misunderstanding or even hostility. This book powerfully reaffirms the continuing importance of our artistic and cultural traditions in shaping the past and creating the future.

GIOVANNI CIANCI is Professor of English Literature at the Universita` degli Studi di Milano.

JASON HARDING is Lecturer in English at the University of Durham.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-12143-9 - T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition Edited by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding Frontmatter More information

Illustration from Triumphal March by T. S. Eliot, illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer # Simon Rendall.

T. S. ELIOT AND THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION

EDITED BY GIOVANNI CIANCI

AND JASON HARDING

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo

Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521121439

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2007 This digitally printed version 2009

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data T. S. Eliot and the concept of tradition / edited by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 215) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-521-88002-2 (hardback) ISBN-10: 0-521-88002-5 (hardback) 1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Influence. 3. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Knowledge – Literature. 4. American literature – 20th century – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 5. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) – History – 20th century. 6. Criticism – United States – History – 20th century. 7. Modernism (Literature) – United States. 8. Canon (Literature) 9. United States – Intellectual life – 20th century. I. Cianci, Giovanni. II. Harding, Jason. III. Title. PS3509.L43Z872464 2007 821.912–dc22 2007013263

ISBN 978-0-521-88002-2 Hardback ISBN 978-0-521-12143-9 Paperback

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Contents

Acknowledgements page vii Notes on contributors viii Abbreviations xii Foreword Sir Frank Kermode xiii

Introduction Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding 1

PART I TRADITION AND IMPERSONALITY 11 1 Exorcizing the demon of chronology: T. S. Eliot’s reinvention of tradition Aleida Assmann 13 2 Proper frontiers: transgression and the individual talent Stan Smith 26 3 Writing the self: dialectic and impersonality in T. S. Eliot Jewel Spears Brooker 41 4 The later fortunes of impersonality: ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and postwar poetry Clive Wilmer 58

PART II CONTEXTS – LITERARY 73 5 French influences and echoes in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ Bernard Brugie`re 75 v

vi Contents 6 Tradition and egoism: T. S. Eliot and The Egoist Jason Harding 90 7 Tradition in 1919: Pound, Eliot and the ‘historical method’ Massimo Bacigalupo 103

PART III CONTEXTS – ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY 117 8 Reading T. S. Eliot visually: tradition in the context of modernist art Giovanni Cianci 119 9 Some art-historical contexts for ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ Michael Hollington 131 10 ‘A living whole’: from T. S. Eliot’s tradition to Hans Blumenberg’s work on myth Claudia Corti 147 11 Whose tradition? T. S. Eliot and the text of anthropology Caroline Patey 161

PART IV CASE STUDIES 175 12 Duchamp’s Eliot: the detours of tradition and the persistence of individual talent Marjorie Perloff 177 13 Tradition and the march of literature: T. S. Eliot and Ford Madox Ford Max Saunders 185 14 At the frontiers of metaphysics: time and history in T. S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin Brett Neilson 201

Select bibliography 215 Index 222

Acknowledgements

The conception of this volume emerged from the stimulating discussions that took place at the interdisciplinary conference ‘Re-Reading T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’’ held at the University of Milan in May 2004. We are grateful to the Rector for hosting this conference and to Alessandro Valenzisi and Marta Sironi for their organization of the exhibi- tion ‘T. S. Eliot and the Avant-Garde’, documenting the modernist London artistic context in the years 1914–20. We would also like to thank Andrea Carosso, Emanuele Ferrari and Elio Franzini for their valuable contributions to these ‘catalytic’ proceedings. Various people have provided assistance and support throughout the arduous process of readying this collection for publication. Nikky Twyman, Frances Whistler and Michael Foster helped with the copy-editing of individual chapters. The organizational skills of Marco Manunta have been invaluable. We are indebted to Valentina Pontolillo D’Elia for compil- ing the index. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press for their constructive comments and Ray Ryan and Maartje Scheltens for their editorial care.

PERMISSIONS We hereby acknowledge permission to cite copyright material as follows: The Cantos of Ezra Pound: Copyright # 1937, 1948 by Ezra Pound. Canti postumi by Ezra Pound: Copyright # 2002 by Omar Pound and Mary de Rachewiltz. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Unpublished Works by Ezra Pound: Copyright # 2007 by Omar Pound and Mary de Rachewiltz. Extracts from the writings of T. S. Eliot, Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath: Copyright # Faber and Faber Ltd.

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Notes on contributors

ALEIDA ASSMANN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Konstanz. Two of her books, Spaces of Memory (1999) and Repression of History: Obsession with History (1999), have a strong interest in the study of memory as an individual, collective and cultural phenomena. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the universities of Rice in Texas, Princeton and Yale.

MASSIMO BACIGALUPO is Professor of American Literature at the University of Genoa. He has edited and translated T. S. Eliot’s Poesie 1905/1920 (1995) and also Pound’s Canti postumi (2002) – an annotated selection from Pound’s manuscripts, many of them never before published. His edition and translation of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf received the Premio Fondazione Achille Marazza prize for 2003.

JEWEL SPEARS BROOKER is Professor of English at Eckerd College. She is the author or editor of eight books on modern literature, including Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994) and (with Joseph Bentley) Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990). In addition, she has edited The Placing of T. S. Eliot (1991), T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World (2001) and, most recently, T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004) in the American Critical Archives series.

BERNARD BRUGIE` RE is Emeritus Professor at the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle de Paris III. He has edited several volumes arising from the proceedings of the university research centre and has also published extensively in the fields of Victorian and twentieth-century literature. He has recently compiled a bilingual anthology of British poetry for Gallimard’s Ple´iade collection.

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Notes on contributors ix

GIOVANNI CIANCI is Professor of English Literature at the University of Milan. He is the author of La Scuola di Cambridge (1970) and La fortuna di Joyce in Italia: saggio e bibliografia, 1917–1972 (1974). In addition, he has edited several volumes: Wyndham Lewis: letteratura/pittura (1982), La Citta` 1830–1930 (1991),IlCe´zanne degli scrittori, dei poeti e dei filosofi (2001) and (with Peter Nicholls) Ruskin and Modernism (2001). His most recent collection is Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediterranean (2006).

CLAUDIA CORTI is Professor of English at the University of Florence. She is interested in the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Her most recent publications are Shakespeare e gli emblemi (2002), Rivoluzione e rivelazione: William Blake tra profeti, radicali e giacobini (2000), Stupende fantasie: saggi su William Blake (2002) and Teatri e paesaggi: modi visivi del Romanticismo inglese (2004). She was recently nominated a member of the Accademia di Scienze e Lettere La Colombaria.

JASON HARDING is a Lecturer in English at the University of Durham. He is the author of The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter- War Britain (2002) and has published articles and reviews on modern literature in the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and Modernism/ Modernity. He has contributed the concluding chapter, ‘Modernist Poetry and the Canon’, to The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007).

MICHAEL HOLLINGTON is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail. He previously taught at the University of New South Wales – where he held the chair of English – and as a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Dickens and the Grotesque (1984) and has published articles on Thomas Hardy, W. H. Hudson, D. H. Lawrence and the modernist novel.

SIR FRANK KERMODE has been Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English at University College, London, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. He is a prolific author. Among his books are Romantic Image (1957), The Sense of an Ending (1967), The Classic (1975), Forms of Attention (1984), An Appetite for Poetry (1989) and Pieces of My Mind: Writings 1958–2002 (2003). He was knighted in 1991.

BRETT NEILSON is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of Free

x Notes on contributors Trade in the Bermuda Triangle and Other Tales of Counter-Globalization (2004). He has also published extensively on modernist literature and culture. He is currently editing a volume on the global drugs trade for the Tracking Globalization series.

CAROLINE PATEY teaches English Literature at the University of Milan. She is the author of Tempi difficili: su Joyce e Proust (1991), Manierismo (1996) and Storie nella storia: teatro e politica nell’Inghilterra rinascimentale (2000). Her most recent publication is a study of Henry James and London, entitled Londra: Henry James e la capitale del moderno (2004). She is editing a volume of essays on James Joyce and memory.

MARJORIE PERLOFF is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California. She has written numerous books, including The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), The Futurist Moment: Avant- Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture (1986), Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), 21st Century Modernism (2002) and, most recently, The Vienna Paradox: A Cultural Memoir (2004)andDifferentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2004). She was 2006 President of the Modern Language Association.

MAX SAUNDERS is Professor of English at King’s College, London, where he teaches modern British, American and European literature. He is the author of a two-volume biography, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (1996), and has edited Ford’s Selected Poems (1997), War Prose (1999) and (with Richard Stang) Critical Essays (2002). He has published essays on numerous authors, including Ford, Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Freud, Rosamund Lehmann, Richard Aldington, May Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence and Ruskin.

STAN SMITH is Research Professor of Literary Studies at Nottingham Trent University. He has published two books on W. H. Auden (1985 and 1997) and edited The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden (2004). Other books include Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth-Century Poetry (1982), Edward Thomas (1986), W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction (1990), The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal (1994) and Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity (2005). Most recently he has edited Globalisation and its Discontents (2006) for the English Association in its centenary year. He is General Editor of the

Notes on contributors xi Longman Critical Reader Series, Longman Studies in Twentieth Century Literature and of a new series for Irish Academic Press.

CLIVE WILMER is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He has published six volumes of his poetry, The Dwelling Place (1977), Devotions (1982), Of Earthly Paradise (1992), Selected Poems (1995), The Falls (2000) and The Mystery of Things (2006). He has translated poems from Hungarian and written extensively on the work of John Ruskin and William Morris. He is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and PN Review.

Abbreviations

ASG After Strange Gods. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. CPP The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. FLA For Lancelot Andrewes. London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928. IMH Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. KEPB Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. London: Faber and Faber, 1964. L1 The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. I, 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. NTDC Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber, 1948. OPP On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. SE Selected Essays, 3rd enlarged edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. SP Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. SW The Sacred Wood, 2nd edition. London: Methuen, 1928. TCC To Criticize the Critic. London: Faber and Faber, 1965. UPUC The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1964. VMP The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. WLF The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1971.

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Foreword Sir Frank Kermode

‘Tradition ...cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.’ I believe it was Harry Levin who first commented on the strangeness of this remark. Tradition ordinarily refers to what is handed on, with the implication that everybody gets it free, whether they want it or not. That Eliot’s essay uses the term in a different sense, or in several different senses, is clear enough, and so is the fact that great labour has been expended on the effort to decide what that sense or senses were. Many have disliked the essay, but it can’t be brushed aside as too vague or too pompous to have historical value, and of course questions concerning the ‘present- ness’ of the past are involved and cannot be easily waved away. As a consequence, an enormous amount of labour has been expended on the elucidation of the famous and occasionally rather obscure manifesto of which the paradoxical statement concerning tradition forms so central a part. The contributors whose labours made possible the present volume seem to me to have had much success; they have added substantially to our understanding of Eliot’s meaning. They enrich and perhaps even make more respectable the argument of what is, for all its daring and all its air of authority, a piece of literary journalism the better part of a hundred years old. They give us reasons to believe in its classical status, alongside ‘Longinus’ or Sidney’s Apology or the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.Ifit was ever in danger of neglect, they have revived our attention to it; the sheer variety of what they have to say testifies to its right to that tribute. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is certainly shown to be patient of interpretation, which is one attribute of classic texts. In the opening chapter Aleida Assmann reminds us of the legal origins of the idea of tradition – the enemy of time, change and death. She remarks that the concept of tradition was retained, perhaps against the odds, ‘in the intellectual framework of modernity’, and the purpose and consequences of this retention are the concern of many other contributors. A desire to transcend the temporal is one motive for valuing tradition as a way of xiii

xiv Foreword exempting art from the threat of the contingent. The image of an existing order which accommodates novelties, making ‘a conformity between old and new’ which does not invalidate that intemporal wholeness, is central to Eliot’s idea. It resembles the scholastic invention of the aevum, an order of duration distinct from both time and eternity, the time of the angels. The aevum was a speculative instrument, intended for purely philosophical use, which came to enjoy great but unexpected practical success. So, in modern literary thought, did ‘tradition’. Perhaps, with suitable modification and expansion, it still does. Marjorie Perloff is one of those who take an interest in contemporary opposition to the cluster of ideas sketched by Eliot – in writers and artists who want no transcendental order, no intemporal wholeness – concentrat- ing, as is proper, on Marcel Duchamp. But she finds him to be a little more interested in Eliot’s ideas than most of us had thought likely. There was bound to be some reciprocal influence between the revised notions of tradition and the anti-passe´istes who needed to reject them. For instance, Wallace Stevens, in his formative years, knew Duchamp and interested himself in that artist’s work, though we do not think of him as anti- traditional and certainly not as Dadaist. Jewel Spears Brooker attends to another very important aspect of Eliot’s thinking: the notion of self-surrender and the related idea of impersonality. It is possible that the discussion of these topics is, in the end, the most valuable part of Eliot’s essay. Other contributors concern themselves with two large topics: the relation of Eliot’s thought to the thought of his contemporaries, and the effect of that thought on later poetry and criticism. Clive Wilmer attends to the English poets who came after Eliot and felt obliged to do something about him. Bernard Brugie`re develops and refreshes the familiar theme of Eliot’s French reading, emphasizing the importance of Charles Maurras to Eliot’s predominantly Latin conception of that transcendent ‘whole’. Massimo Bacigalupo adds to our knowledge concerning the influence of Pound; Max Saunders does the same for Ford Madox Ford. Jason Harding informs us about the poet’s energetic parti- cipation, in articles written for such little magazines as The Egoist, in the criticism of some obvious enemies, like the Futurists and the Dadaists. Those modernists whose passion for the present requires the destruction of the past (meaning that part of it that has been saved by the claims of the intemporal) are the enemies of this modernist. Other contributors introduce modern anthropology to augment our rather too familiar acquaint- ance with Jane Harrison; and yet others introduce into the conversation the names of Alois Riegl, Hans Blumenberg and Walter Benjamin.

Foreword xv All are performing a service that the very manner of Eliot’s essay – and the authority he claimed and won – have from the outset made necessary. What he says about tradition and about the individual talent absolutely requires commentary. We see from Stan Smith’s essay that it is possible to take a fresh look at the piece and, after generations of comment, still find things calling for elucidation, like the quotation from Aristotle’s De Anima at the head of the final section. In this manner, much comparable enlight- enment will be found throughout this volume.